Cockburn/St. Clair: Enron and the Green Seal

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Mon Dec 24 14:42:30 PST 2001



>From: "Mina Kumar" <wejazzjune at hotmail.com>
>
>I sometimes wonder if certain people choose their leftist politics simply
>because they enjoy dissenting from more popular convictions, and when they
>acquire a circle of like-minded people, they find themselves put upon to
>dissent again, no matter how it contradicts their own previous statements,
>because agreement is too much like conformity.

Bingo. My thanks to Michael Perelman for his recent mention here on the list of Carlos Baker's Emerson Among the Eccentrics, which contains this nugget:

"As Emerson afterward expressed it, there was 'something military' in Thoreau's nature, 'not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory ... required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum to call his powers into full exercise.' ... On hearing any proposition, 'his first instinct ... was to controvert it,' and in a manner 'never affectionate but superior, didactic,' scornful of the 'petty ways' of his interlocutors, like a New England Socrates at his most eristic."

Carl

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